


Writer's Block

by monsterkiss



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-10
Updated: 2013-11-10
Packaged: 2018-01-01 02:26:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1039262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterkiss/pseuds/monsterkiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was no more responsible for Syo than she was for any other criminal, if anything, she was Syo’s first and greatest victim.<br/>It was enough, she could not be expected to do any more. She had paid her dues to Syo. And yet…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Writer's Block

Strange thoughts can come to you when you wake up in the early hours, lying on a rough carpet and fully dressed for the cold outside. Fukawa Touko could remember seeing the phrase somewhere, probably on a dessert menu or a advertisement or something similarly pointless and insipid. It didn’t matter where, the important thing was that that was the point where it all crystallised. Her personal defining moment of despair. Some awful person had just printed that and thrown it out there without so much as a thought.

_You only live once!_

That was it. They might as well have just spat in her face. Didn’t that perfectly encapsulate how truly unfair her lot in life was? You only lived once. Each human was allotted one life, to do with as they pleased. The most simple and basic thing, and she didn’t have even that much. She had been given exactly half a life, and the rest of her existence had been alloted to _her._

She was in her room, though she couldn’t remember how she got there. When they’d first become aware of each other, they’d left notes, but those had been abandoned once they became little more than a means of trading abuse. Now their only regular contact was through cut-out reports from the newspapers she found wedged between the pages of her books, usually jammed in the middle of a love scene. She supposed Syo found it funny.

Genocider Syo. At least her atrocious behaviour had allowed her to finally put a name to her other half.

She stood up and clawed at the walls for the light-switch, though illumination only succeeded in trading dim shadows for blurry colours. For once, Syo had actually left her glasses in their case on her desk, and as soon as she put them on she began searching her body for wounds and bloodstains. Those at least had become fewer and fewer as Syo’s abilities became more discrete and efficient.

She hadn’t been entirely perfect this time, though. As Touko held her hands up she could see the red-brown of dried blood under her fingernails. She closed her eyes quickly, but the sight and the knowledge of it caught in her stomach like a fish-hook and she teetered on her feet, almost collapsing.

There was a bottle of water on her desk. She poured some out over each hand before scrubbing furiously with a handful of tissues. By the time she was able to open her eyes her fingers were red and there was tattered paper all over her skirt, but the blood was gone. She sighed and slumped in her desk chair, the feeling of her skin writhing and her brain splitting slowly receding.

She placed the bottle back on her desk and almost jumped when she saw the flashing light on her laptop. She knew she’d turned it off before… before Syo had taken over.

She flipped it open with a sinking feeling gathering and immediately confirmed when the screen lit up to display her word processor.

Sixty-two pages. A new record. Gritting her teeth, she scrolled up the document and began reading the new material.

There was a time when she’d deleted Syo’s contributions on principle. She couldn’t remember what had first made her stop and read one of the rambling, stream-of-consciousness additions, but once she had she’d stopped removing them. They were littered through the text, some whole pages long and some only an odd sentence, something that might be missed by an amateur too dull to recognise when their own work had been tampered with.

Her own prose, written with ice-cold precision and red-hot passion and with Syo’s poetry delicately piercing her ideas at every turn, flushing them out, effortlessly complementing them. She growled. Alone, her work was exceptional, but Syo offered something far more satisfying and infuriating. She made it _complete._

She angrily clicked the “save” button and slumped back in the seat, only to spring up suddenly when she felt something press against her back. She scrambled around for a few seconds before giving up and pulling off her jacket. Tucked inside, speared straight through the lining, were two pairs of clean silver scissors.

She threw the jacket onto the floor, breathing heavily. One of the scissors fell out and gleamed at her from the floor, slightly open as if waiting for something soft and fleshy to get trapped in its maw. She swallowed hard and turned away, wiping a sleeve across the sweat that had gathered on her forehead. What little warm feeling had begun to surface after seeing her perfected work had been cleanly sheared away.

It had occurred to her more than once that she could turn herself in. But wouldn’t that be the perfect miserable ending to the unfair story she’d been dealt? Spending her life in prison because of _her,_ having to atone for her crimes and take responsibility for her depravity. It was enough that she had to tolerate her stealing all the boys away before she even got a chance to touch them, that she had to lead a half-life of sudden blackouts and unexplained cuts and bruises. She was no more responsible for Syo than she was for any other criminal, if anything, she was Syo’s first and greatest victim.

It was enough, she could not be expected to do any more. She had paid her dues to Syo. And yet…

The laptop monitor gleamed. She could feel Syo’s words bleeding into her work, revitalising it even when she’d hit her writer’s block hard enough to kill the whole thing off. It didn’t feel like an insult or an accusation. It felt like an offer.

She turned back to look at the pair of scissors on the carpet. Slowly she reached down and lifted it up, the handles fitting perfectly around her fingers. She shivered. There wasn’t so much as a spot of blood on the blades, not even right in the joints. Syo was an exceptional murderer, but she wondered what she needed to make _her_ work “complete.”


End file.
